Moving DAZ to a New Computer - The Complete Guide
Mr Scott
Posts: 51
I just got done moving Daz to a new computer. Although there is a substantial amount of information available on how to do this, it is quite fragmented spread across different posts, within posts, and across the internet. This is my attempt to organize the steps into one place. There are other ways to do this but this is what I did in January 2024 and everything worked after I got done.
I do need to give credit to WP Guru. His YouTube video below is the core of what I did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZau8cv5saQ&t=2s
1.) Install Daz Import Manager (DIM) or Daz Central to new computer.
WP Guru explains this in detail. I am more use to DIM so I used that. He gives directions on where you can find the download link for that on the Daz website, Account>Product Library.
2.) Use the newly installed DIM to install a fresh version of Daz Studio on the new computer.
Again, WP Guru does a good job of explaining how to do this. I installed to the default location on the C drive.
3.) Move your content Libraries to the new computer.
WP Guru does a good job of explaining what and how to find these. If you have everything on an external hard drive then it is just a matter of plugging these into the new computer. Otherwise, I have everything on a second internal drive, so I had to copy everything to an external USB and move them to the second hard drive on the new machine.
4.) Map those newly moved content Libraires in Daz so Daz can find them.
WP Guru explains this pretty well. Essentially what you have to do in DAZ is go to:
Edit Menu>Preferences>Content Tab>Content Directory Manager>click on DAZ Studio Formats>click on your directory name>chose Edit. Then you can navigate to the location of your directory. Do this for each library you have. The two important default ones are My DAZ 3D Library and My Library.
5.) Tell DIM where the content libraires are on the new computer so it knows where to install new content. Again, WP Guru explains this but you need to open DIM and then:
Gear Icon in upper right> Advanced Settings>Installation> click the “+” button on the bottom. It is going to make you type in the name of your directory and then you can navigate to the location.
6.) Save your layout. If you changed your work place layout at all from one of the default layouts then you should save it so you do not have to redo on the new machine.
Windows>Work Space>Save As> name your layout
7.) Move/copy the CMS and the Studio4 folder. These are your saved user settings. The CMS folder contains custom categories you may have created and the Studio4 folder contains user settings such as the saved layout from above. Here is the default location for both of these folders:
C:>Users> (Your user name) AppData>Roaming>DAZ 3D
AppData is hidden so you have to enable show hidden files.
There are other ways to do this but I just copied both of these folders to a USB drive and moved them to the new computer. Before I copied them onto the new machine, I moved the native folders on the new computer to a new folder just in case. If you installed Daz to the default locations, these folders are in the same location above and you just copy the folders from your old machine to the same location but now on your new machine. Also, it’s not a bad idea to make backups of these folders from time to time.
8.) Move your DIM Manifest folder to new computer. If you do not do this, then all your installed content will show in DIM as uninstalled and ready for down load. This can be found at at:
Daz 3D Insatall Manager>Install Manager>manifest files.
After that has been moved, you need to tell DIM where to find it. For that:
Start DIM>click on the gear in the upper right hand corner> go to the Installation tab. The top field is the Manifest field where you can navigate to the correct location. Also, if you do not know where this is, you can use this field on your old computer to find it. I keep mine with nmy content libraires.
9.) Reinstall purchased plugins. You can do this from DIM and they are going to show up as installed. I did uninstall and then reinstalled one at a time. A curve ball here is that some of them may not show up after they are installed until you reenter the license serial number. To do this you need to go into DAZ to the Main Menu and then Help>About Installed Plugins. You can find the license codes at the Daz website > Account>Serial Numbers. Then just cut and paste the serial number into Daz.
Another complication is remembering what was a plugin that needs to be reinstalled. One place to look is the Serial Number page on the Daz website above. Another thing is that it seems like all the plugins have Win-64 bit in their description. So I searched DIM for 64-bit to get a list of plugins.
10.) Backup. After I verified everything worked, and it did. I initiated a backup using BackBlaze.
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Comments
Thanks.
I configured DIM to point to my content library locations after installing it and before installing the DAZ Studio & such binaries. In that way, with the new versions of DIM & DAZ Studio/DAZ Studio Public Beta, the content library locations were autofilled out in the DAZ Studio install process. I still manually checked that the content library locations were correct and I still had to manually add non-standard content location. eg, like my Poser 12 Pro content library.
I no longer use DAZ Studio to log into the DAZ Servers and it saves me metadata & content updates from being done via DAZ Studio with often conflict with DIM locations for whatever reason. Now it gets only done via DIM only so no conflicting data updates happen.
Also, you have to still update your serials manually. In the future, when DAZ 3D hardens it's security, I would like all my serials revoked and new ones issued for those revoked and DAZ Studio itself connect to DAZ 3D servers and activate my bought / free plugins automatically. I don't want the metadata/DS online product updates to happen though with that automatic serial activation so they would need to be checkboxes in DAZ Studio to disallow metadata and product updates within DAZ studio but a check to autoactivate serials. With each data breach, DAZ can deactivate the breached serials and issue new ones. The old serials would get left behind in old obsolete versions of DAZ Studio with future updates of DAZ Studio and it's plugins that disallow revoked serials.
There is now an option, off by default, on the sign-in dialogue controlling whether or not the emtadata is updated automatically.
Thanks. I will look at that when I go to my other computer that has DAZ Studio installed.